I don't see any mention of Cortana or how hard that is to rip out of the OS, but I think it's worth mentioning. The tool called "Everything" by https://www.voidtools.com/ is so insanely better than Cortana and blazingly fast that I'm not sure why they're still trying to push Cortana.

https://www.getblackbird.net/ helps a lot and it's one of the first things I do to Windows installs when I need to use them, but it can break stuff if you're too aggressive with it (e.g. Windows store / Xbox stuff, which for some reason is how to record screenshot videos in Windows... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/record-a-game-cl... ).

The article also didn't mention the Microsoft Store and how awful everything around that experience is, especially compared to macOS, where the worst part is how signing apps works ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se... vs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/package/signin... ).